1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to medical related alarm devices, and more particularly to devices for reminding a person to take medication or perform some other medical related activity.
2. Background Information
It is very common for a patient to take one or more medications during the course of a day. It may be important that the patient take a number of medications, and that they be taken at specified times in order to increase their effectiveness, or to eliminate reactions with other medications being taken. In the case of AIDS patients, it is essential that patients take a large number of drugs, at frequent intervals, at very precise times during the day for effective treatment in current medication regimens. The average person may have a hard time remembering to take any particular medication, and will have an even harder time when there are numerous medications and times for taking them. If a patient is distracted, busy, forgetful, or suffering memory deficiencies or attention deficits, it may become impossible for the patient to keep track of his medications and take them on schedule.
Another problem facing many patients is that they may find themselves in a situation where they require emergency medical assistance in their home or away from the hospital, and they may be unable to tell the emergency medical response personnel what medications they are taking, when they last took them, what the history of taking them for the day has been, or other important medical and personal information which the emergency medical response personnel need to know. This could happen if the person simply couldn""t keep track of all the medications he had taken that day, it could also happen when a person was incapacitated by a diabetic coma, a stroke, a heart attack, an epileptic seizure, or other situations in which this information would prove important to personnel in the field.
There are numerous devices available which act as timers to remind a patient when to take a medication. These devices come in a variety of forms and with a variety of features, but none of them fully satisfy the needs of the patient. Some devices are in the form of a wristwatch, and medications and the times for taking them are entered in the wristwatch. Like any alarm wristwatch, at the indicated time for taking the medication, an alarm goes off. The patient may read on the watch what medication is to be taken, and he would then turn off the alarm. The prior art devices assume that when the alarm is turned off, the patient has taken the medication. For some of these alarm devices, that is the end of their functionality. Other alarm devices may record information about the patient, his medications, and the schedule for taking them. Sometimes this information is downloadable to a doctor""s computer or a pharmacist""s computer.
Medical alarm devices with reminders for taking medication can also take the form of containers which store medications, so that the container may be opened when the alarm goes off and the medication either dispensed to patients, or taken by the patient himself.
There are critical features which prior art alarm devices do not provide to the patient. Many bedside alarm clocks offer a feature which allows a user to press a xe2x80x9csnoozexe2x80x9d button, which turns the alarm off a few minutes, but comes back on again in 10 or 15 minutes to remind the user to get up. The concept of the xe2x80x9csnoozexe2x80x9d button is useful for a patient being reminded to take medication, because the medication alarm may go off while he is driving, and the patient would not be able to immediately stop and taken the medication. It would be useful for the patient to be able to turn the alarm off but be reminded at a later time to take the indicated medication. If a person has multiple medications to take, and they turn off the alarm for the first medication, and before they can take the first medication a reminder for a second medication comes up, they need to be able to turn the alarm off for the second medication also, and be reminded at a later time to take both the first and the second medication. If the patient is reminded for numerous medications, such as 8 or 10, he needs to be able to turn the alarm off, and also needs to be reminded at a later time to take those 8 or 10 medications.
Another feature which is lacking in prior art reminder devices is the feature of presenting to emergency medical response personnel important medical information about the patient, including the medications taken that day. Some prior art devices store this information, and it may be retrieved by interaction with a computer, such as at the doctor""s office, but what is needed is a simple and fool proof display of information in the field to an emergency medical response person.
The information and displays described above present a problem for medical information appliances. Some of the information above can have many characters, such as 20, 30 or 40 characters. Digital display means for a device the size of a watch have a difficult time presenting 30 plus characters in a format which is visible to the user. The solution to this dilemma is using an array of pixels which has the capability of scrolling characters across the display so that a line of numerous characters are readable to the user.
Accordingly, it is an object of the invention to provide a medical information appliance in which medical events such as medications or other medical activities can be recorded, and times can be recorded for each medical event. It is a further object to remind a user when the time for performing a medical event arrives, and to provide a way for him to turn the alarm off but still be reminded to perform the activity at a later time.
It is a further object of the invention to provide the capability of reminding the patient of multiple medical events, allowing the patient to turn the alarm off on those events as they occur, and to be reminded later to perform the multiple medical events which had been earlier reminded.
It is a further object of the invention to provide the medical information appliance with the ability to display medical information and a history of medical events to an emergency rescue person in the field, without the use of supplemental equipment for downloading the information. It is another object of the invention to provide a scrolling display of information in a medical information appliance, so that a string of data can be displayed in a legible form.
Additional objects, advantages and novel features of the invention will be set forth in part in the description as follows, and in part will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon examination of the following, or may be learned by practice of the invention. The objects and advantages of the invention may be realized and attained by means of the instrumentalities and combinations particularly pointed out in the appended claims.
These and other objects are attained by the medical information device of the appliance. The medical information device of the appliance includes a memory means for storing various kinds of information which the user enters. The information the user enters can be medical information or medical events. Medical information includes such things as blood type, doctor""s name, patient""s name, patient""s age, conditions such as allergies or diabetes, and other information which would be useful for an emergency medical technician. Medical events are medical activities which take place at a certain time and for which the patient is reminded. Medical events can include taking medication at certain times, taking a blood pressure at certain times, eating food at certain times, calling the doctor at certain times, or any health related activity which is set to occur at certain times of the day so many times per day. Both medical information and medical events are entered into the medical information appliance by the user, without the need for extraneous devices or connections such as to a computer, a keyboard, or other input devices. In one form of the invention, the means of entering medical information and medical event data is by the use of buttons which are located on the device. The device also includes a timing means which keeps time, and alerts the user when the time for performing a medical event has arrived. A display means is also included, which displays a scrolling line of characters. The medical information device also includes a means for activating the scrolling message of medical information of medical events. The medical events scroll across at a preselected time, and medical information scrolls across the display means when activated. The device also includes a notification means for signaling a medical event. The notification means activates the scrolling of information across the display means and activates an alarm.
The device also includes a reminder mode activation means, for activating a reminder mode. When the reminder mode is activated, typically by pressing a button, the notification means is deactivated. The notification means would typically be an alarm, a buzzer, or a vibration. When the reminder is activated, after a period of time, a reminder alarm sounds. This would typically be a brief alarm sound, which did not continue, but repeated itself at regular intervals of time until the reminder mode was deactivated. When the reminder mode is activated, the medical event associated with that reminder mode is displayed in the display means.
The device also includes a confirmation means, typically a button, which deactivates the reminder mode and which a user activates when the medical event is responded to. This would typically be button which is depressed when the user was able to take the medication indicated by an earlier alarm, and would deactivate the continuing reminder alarm.
The device also contains a readout means, in which medical information and medical events can be displayed by repeated activation of the readout button. The readout means would be most beneficial to rescue personnel or someone who needed access to the medical information. By pressing one button, which would probably be prominently displayed on the device, medical information would be displayed in an approximate order of priority. This medical information would include the patient""s name, his blood type, his phone number, an emergency contact person, that person""s phone number, the doctor""s name and phone number, and any allergies or conditions such as diabetes or epilepsy. Each time the button is depressed, a different block of medical information is displayed in a scrolling display of characters. As the button is continued to be depressed, medical events can also be displayed so that rescue personnel can see what medication the user has taken, what medication was taken that day, and at what times during the day each medication was taken. It is important that this readout is available for use in the field by rescue personnel without the use of additional hardware such as a computer.
The device also includes an alarm mode defeat means, in which all of the alarms for medical events can be turned off, and stay off until the defeat means is deactivated. This would allow a person to stop using the medical information appliance on a daily basis, but continue to use it as a time piece, or to put it in storage, without erasing all of the information on medical events, and without having the alarms for medical events continue when they are not necessary.
The reminder mode would serve to remind the user of more than one medical event which had been scheduled, but which had not been confirmed. If more than one medical event were scheduled, but the user had not confirmed that it had been performed, the reminder mode would continue and show on the display each of the medical events which had been signaled. When the user found time to perform the medical event, he could confirm each medical event which had been previously signaled but not confirmed.
The medical device of the invention can include a display means which is a field of pixels in which characters are formed. These characters would typically scroll from right to left, so that they could be read from left to right by the user. The display means would be two rows of pixel fields, in which the first display row is positioned above the second display row. It would be obvious to one skilled in this art to realize that different configurations of display means could also be utilized, and would fall within the scope of the invention. For instance, more than two rows of pixel fields could be utilized, and other display means beside pixel fields could also be used, if they allowed a scrolling of the characters across the display means.
The medical information appliance of the invention can also record the time when a medical event is confirmed, as indicated by depressing the confirmation button. This recording of confirmation times provides a history of times than medical events were confirmed. This could indicate to the patient, the doctor, or to a rescue person the times of day or the most recent times that a medications were taken by the patient.
The medical information appliance of the invention can take the form of a watch worn by a user. This could be in the form of a wristwatch, a pendant watch, a pocket watch, or other forms of watches. The medical information appliance can also be in the form of a hand held computer, and thus could be a computer program on such a computer. The device could also be supplied with a means of communication of data from the medical information appliance and a computer. This exchange of information could be by an infrared beam, an interfitting memory storage device, a data transfer cable, or any other means of transferring information from one computer to another.
Still other objects and advantages of the present invention will become readily apparent to those skilled in this art from the following detailed description wherein I have shown and described only the preferred embodiment of the invention, simply by way of illustration of the best mode contemplated by carrying out my invention. As will be realized, the invention is capable of modification in various obvious respects all without departing from the invention. Accordingly, the drawings and description of the preferred embodiment are to be regarded as illustrative in nature, and not as restrictive.